Traitor or Heroine? Deciphering an 80-year-old British WWII secret (Boston, London, Paris; 1928-1941 and present-day): Put on your thinking caps! Play detective and investigative reporter in this twists and turns WWII mystery uncovered by a fictional journalist, who makes the case for why we can’t get enough of well-researched WWII fiction with terrific prose.

Katherine Reay, who’s written seven other novels, isn’t new at this, but her new did-she-do-it WWII story offers new historical information apparently released in 1998. Still, we don’t know what was left out, and/or what might have been covered up, either cryptically, codified, or altered in some other way. This, then, is a complex novel for figuring out whether history was right or wrong when two intrepid, personally invested characters are determined to find out the truth. With names sometimes kept the same through three generations, codes used, genealogy to keep straight, and a lot of history tracked, The London House engages mystery lovers, historical or otherwise.

Pay attention to clues found in the novel’s significant epistolary format woven throughout: letters, diaries, archival notes, and war telegrams that feel voyeuristic and authentic. The narrative parts between the two main characters from Boston – Caroline Waite Payne and Mat Hammond – help to guide us.

A fictional article Mat has written for The Atlantic magazine drives the plot. He’s ready to hit the button to send it to his editor. He still has some time before his deadline although limited, so you’ll feel the pressure as the hunt gets closer to it. A fine, ethical journalist, he knows his article would be even better if an ancestor would preview it, provide comments, and sign off on it. The obstacle is the Waite and Payne families avoided digging into the story believing the truth was too painful, so they dwelled on the shame of it: that one of the daughters, a twin, of the original descendants of nobility was a traitor, so her death delivered justice. 

Mat believes there’s more to the story, that his article may not have all of it. We see how that plays out. The family member he reaches out to he had a close relationship with six years ago in college. Her grandmother Margaret was the twin sister of the woman at the center of the mystery – Caroline Amelia Waite born in 1918. Fast forward to the present-day, to third generation, twenty-eight-year-old ex-friend also named Caroline – Payne. She sensed her grandmother’s sadness but never knew why. She’ll find that out after Mat convinces her to get involved, but not until nearly the end.

His Atlantic piece proposes history can be wrong. That’s the intellectual part. The emotional part is found in the affecting prose, in complicated relationships. Past ones include the changing relationship between the twin sisters and an entangled love story. Present ones are between 1) Caroline and Mat, seen in romantic tension, 2) Caroline and her British father, adamantly against anyone unearthing this story after all these years, 3) Caroline and her older brother (married with a child also named Caroline), who doesn’t want her to do anything to upset their father surviving cancer, and 4) her divorced mother living in The London House. All these relationships are put to the test, all fraught when the story begins.

At sixteen, Caroline Waite left America for London. She lived at the family’s countryside mansion in Derbyshire named Parkley, then moved into the London House, which holds memories of fear and betrayal – “the hollowness of utter defeat.” Present-day Caroline was told her great-aunt was a victim of polio, which wasn’t true. On page 10 of this 350-page book (so not much of a spoiler), Mat tells Caroline the great-aunt she didn’t know was a secretary in Winston Churchill’s WWII secret intelligence operations SOE (Special Operations Executive), then supposedly fled with her “Nazi lover.” The other side of the story is what-if she was a British spy and something went wrong?

The female spy network has been the subject of other historical novels (see https://enchantedprose.com/code-name-helene/) and nonfiction books, but they were about known spies. Reay keeps us guessing whether Caroline Waite was or wasn’t. Listen to a real Churchill SOE agent who could be speaking for Caroline Waite – or not.

A great opening quote by Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician who broke the German Enigma code that ended WWII, is the first hint that “sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

One of my favorite parts is what Mat’s written. Aimed at confirming or correcting the past, it feels, pointedly, for us, for today and our future. Here’s an excerpt:

“In a time that necessitates reaching for the past to understand our present and navigate our futures with greater intention, there is a call to memorialize our shining moments, our sacrifices, our heroes. As we grapple with the aftermath of a world pandemic, tumultuous elections, social upheaval, the rise of sectarian interests, intolerance, and financial insecurity across the globe, we find ourselves examining the past to find the firm footing our present fails to provide . . . Contrary to popular ethos, I have found greater growth and understanding come from our failures. It is the fallen who reveal to us our humanity, our perseverance, our yearning for right, our resilience, and our determination to stand after stumbling . . .”

Around 100 pages in, you’ll realize Mat is right: he does not have the whole story. The Waite family accepted their daughter’s death but her body was never found.

A different type of tragedy befell Caroline Payne’s family when her younger sister, interestingly named Amelia, died two years ago. She grew up feeling she deserved her parents’ emotional abandonment, blaming herself for her sister’s death. Her self-perception that she can never be good enough may be flawed but it’s believable.

Caro’s (nickname) story begins in a 1941 Prologue in Paris when she’s working at the “ninety-eight-room mansion” of the House of Schiaparelli – the legendary, flamboyant fashion designer inspired by Surrealism – fitting her bold, daring personality.

Caro’s close friend and colleague, Martine, is fleeing the “too dangerous” 1941 city but she believes “Schiap keeps me safe.” Bringing Paris’ haute culture into the story adds charm and heady times before Germany invaded France. Focusing on the designer outspoken about Germany’s fascism and yet the only reason her showroom wasn’t shut down was she catered to wealthy Germans – versus her rival Coco Chanel believed to be a Nazi spy – exposes conflicting wartime ideologies, attitudes, and hypocrisy, real and necessary to stay alive.

Caro’s precarious situation quickly switches to the now, when Caroline receives a call from Mat. Immediately, she recalls his “electric smile” and his determination and brilliance that were “challenging,” accompanied by a vague feeling of “longing.” His persistence and energy challenges her once again, and us, when he tells her that his story, “your story,” can “provide a sense of hope.” He goes on to say that history can “assure us that when bad things happen, life continues, and that we humans are resilient and endure. Hope emerges from tragedy.” That “how we deal with pain and adversity remains relevant no matter how long ago it happened.”

Is this why we can’t get enough of WWII fiction? Arriving before the holidays after nearly two years of hopelessness, history is a gift.

Lorraine

How the sorrows of a white Afrikaner family reflect pre- and post-Apartheid (Pretoria, South Africa; 1986-2016): “Why is there not one normal person” in this novel? A question – adapted from the epigraph in which an odd woman ironically asks of film director Federico Fellini’s movies – you might ask of the characters in The Promise, the 2021 winner of the Booker Prize. Because Damon Galgut’s brilliantly conceived historical novel (his ninth; two earlier ones nominated for the prize) is hard-hitting and unusually written.

A different, yet related question frames the premise of the novel: “How did it become so complicated?” Galgut answers by tracking thirty years of a chaotic, conflicted white Afrikaner family, with its own share of odd (and prejudiced) characters, against the backdrop of a country’s turbulent history.

The most palpable and haunting injustice is racist based. A promise was asked by Rachel Swart on her deathbed at forty when the novel opens. Her demanding, insensitive, unfaithful husband Manie promised he’d keep it, but doesn’t since it involves a black woman – the long-time maid who helped raise all three of their children and care for dying Rachel. 

Manie owns lands and a farm near Pretoria, South Africa (where Galgut is from), drives a Mercedes, and co-owns a reptile park (“always obsessed with the cold-hearted sort”), exemplifying white privilege. Land ownership is one of the legacies of Apartheid the democratic government has yet to rectify. Its significance in the Swart family’s story reflects that.

The title implies hope. Had the promise been kept it would have been a hopeful sign in a changing country. Unmet, it sets the hopelessness tone of a family that’s lost its way. Traced in four, long chapters named for Ma and Pa and two of their three children, revisited roughly every ten years: 1986 before the end of sanctioned racism, 1995 when Nelson Mandela became the first President, through 2004 and 2016 chapters.

The death of former white Afrikaner president FW de Klerk while I was reading the novel, a man who’d been for and then against apartheid policies (not as forcefully as the world hoped), intensifies the reality of the family’s story, echoing the intensity of the promise of democracy. “One of the most emotional and political transitions of our time,” remarked Princeton Lyman when US Ambassador to South Africa.

Described as a “spiritual pageant,” Mandela, wearing a “green Springbok jersey,” awards the Rugby World Cup to Francois Pienaar to a cheering, grateful crowd, showing a grateful nation in 1995 when Apartheid ended. Sports a meaningful way to break down tribal barriers. The reference is the most upbeat The Promise gets.

Instead of uplifting, what you’ll get is brutal honesty. Wasted potential. Lost opportunities. The importance of the church. Death. Racism and tribalism. Complexities and legacies seen through a complex family and a country’s complex history.

The novel defies expectations. The word tribe is frequently used. Expecting the novel to pit white against black, which it especially does in the unfulfilled promise, it also pits white against white, religiously and ethnically. The “pain and struggle” of one family invokes the country’s long history of pain and struggle.

The narrative style alone, unlike any other I’ve read, stands out. Shifting from 1^st person to 3^rd and the least common 2^nd voice, alternating viewpoints aren’t separated by chapter nor punctuated; they shift within the same chapter’s sentences and paragraphs. The effect is altering Time, one of the themes. The prose sometimes feels dream-like/hallucinatory and stream-of-consciousness as narrators revert to the past, present, and future almost in one big breathe, amidst a country trying to forget its past and remake its future.

Contemptuous of the Swart family and extended relatives, the tone often sarcastic starting with the surname. Swart is an archaic word that means dark-skinned. The exception to this, in this reviewer’s opinion, is the way we view the youngest child, Amor, whom we meet at thirteen and already an outsider. The only person she’s affectionate with is Salome, the black maid; the only one who cares about fulfilling the promise.

Amor and Salome are the only two characters I liked. Amor because we empathize with her loneliness and trauma and she’s kind. Salome is the devoted one. Middle sister Astrid treats Amor condescendingly: “She was always thick with the underclasses.” Amor is also the only one who heard the promise asked and made, but no one believes her or chooses to disregard her.

Like the title, we would have been clued into Amor’s importance had the US edition kept the original UK cover.

The picture of a young girl with penetrating, sad eyes would have focused our attention on her from the get-go. She’s also the only person in the immediate family that doesn’t get her own chapter. Lucky for her, actually. 

Family “claws” dug deep into Amor’s soul, the reason she “never learns to live properly.” Astrid is the one who overlives. Anton, the “prodigal son,” the “golden boy,” struggles between underliving and overliving. He’s nineteen when the novel begins, conscripted into the army, a policy that ended when Apartheid did.

For a novel structured chronologically through three decades, pages, sentences, words, and thoughts blend past, present, and future. Each sibling chooses a path in reaction to the past and/or present. “Time has played on all our faces.” Playing with time doesn’t let us forget how it was and could have been. Anton wants the most; Amor believes “to move forward its best not to look back.” When forced to, she recalls, “Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.” Her overbearing aunt, Manie’s prejudiced sister, Tannie Marina, who appears on page one (her follower husband, Uncle Ockie also dislikeable) agrees: “We’re not going backwards now” on honoring the promise. Ironically, keeping the promise would signal moving forward.

Anton’s white girlfriend thinks “the problem with the country . . . is that some people just can’t get let go of the past.” The plight of the homeless, another character, shows “time passes differently for the homeless.” “For those shut out of the world.”

Multi-layered, the novel feels much longer than 269 pages. I don’t pretend to understand the country’s history of a “wretched struggle to survive” like Anton says about himself, but references googled give a sense of how much is packed in.

Two centuries ago, South Africa’s constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, so this is a diversely religious country. Rachel apparently left Judaism to worship in Manie’s church, the Dutch Reformed Church, second largest in this predominately Christian country. Converting back to her Jewish roots so she can be buried in the Jewish tradition is carried out but not without resentment and discrimination by Tannia: “Why couldn’t my brother marry into his own tribe?” Followed in the next sentence by, “I made a mistake, he said, and you pay for your own mistakes,” switching narrators.

Other than Jewish genealogists, how many of us know the history of Jewish migration to South Africa? The vast majority are Orthodox (unlike the US), including Rachel. Religious conflicts are seen as tribal. Rachel’s story is a great example of that.

The larger and best-known white tribal conflicts are between Afrikaners who speak with a Dutch accent as distinguished by English-speakers. Language differences are also rooted in complex historical legacies.

Arriving at a time when democracies are being seriously challenged, the theme of keeping promises is a valuable lesson. Even when the truth is hard to swallow.

Lorraine

What comes next after heartbreak (Rochester, Minnesota; present-day with backstories): Tracey Garvis Graves writes with a big heart. Heard it in a Love Song treats you to two “caring, salt-of-the-earth” hearts.

To get into the life-at-a-crossroads mood of the novel, listen to the lyrics of this Fleetwood Mac song, Landslide, the author cites as inspiration for her ninth novel in a Dear Letter addressed to readers of advanced copies. Note the words sung in the video below ask the central question/theme of the novel: “Can I sail through the changing ocean tides, can I handle the seasons of my life?”

(For a playlist of all 28 songs referred to in the novel, see here.)

The two hearts: One, the protagonist’s. Thirty-five-year-old music teacher Layla, fresh from a difficult divorce after ten years of marriage (papers pending). She’s the primary character asking the fundamental-to-the-romance plot question. That’s not to say the second heart isn’t struggling with the same question after his twenty-year marriage ended (he too waiting for the paperwork to make the break official). Josh Summers, slightly older than Layla, is an electrician who doesn’t have as much time to dwell on how to move forward socially as he’s a devoted dad sharing custody of his precious daughter, Sasha, a kindergartner in Layla’s music class. Layla is also the teacher who greets the students and their parents when they drop off and pick up their children, meaning she sees Josh often.

Recognizing there’s a chemistry between you and one of your student’s parents is tricky. Not as much, though, as entering into a new relationship after a divorce because: a) you’re not ready, b) you’ve been burned, and c) you don’t trust yourself, so you’re cautious and not sure you can tell the difference between genuine emotions from rebound ones.

Layla is the one who gave up her guitar/singing dreams of becoming a “rock goddess” in a band for a man whose values didn’t mesh with hers. Josh was the one happy in his marriage until two people married-too-young outgrew one another.

One reason Graves’ characters touch us as much as they do is they’re quite relatable. Relationships and emotions hit a nerve, regardless of whether you’re divorced, thinking about it, unhappy in your marriage or other type of relationship, or you’re single. Like wanting another chance at the brass ring. Like accepting ourselves, and stop blaming ourselves when relationships go wrong. Like closing ourselves off when they do. Most of all, not compromising the important things you want in life, after figuring out just what they are.

Music and journaling therapy are key to helping Layla recover and discover herself. The pandemic has shown us that having or cultivating “creative outlets” for coping, escaping, healing, and feeling good about ourselves are therapeutic. Graves may not be a songwriter, but uses her creativity to compose lyrics that sound like the music she loves.

Dogs as companions also soothe. Assistive-therapy dogs bring joy and can be life-savers. Dog adoptions surged during the pandemic. The cuddly addition of a “giant, white fluffy” senior dog named Norton, who can’t-stand-to-be-alone, is part of this picture. Josh adopts him for Sasha, providing more opportunities for Layla and Josh to get to know each other when she volunteers to watch him when Josh can’t.

Feel-good novels are Graves’ hallmark, presented with realistic challenges along the way. Feel-good is in limited quantity these days, depending on your outlook and circumstances. So, like author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s testimonial on the novel’s cover, “I cannot get enough of Tracey Garvis Graves.” Enough of her warmth, kindness, and romantic prose – darn good at crafting “flirty.” After reading and reviewing her last novel published in 2019 (a prolific author, writing nine novels in about nine years) The Girl He Used to Know, and inhaling On the Island (published a year before this blog was launched), you learn the author has a gift for tugging heartstrings.

This romantic story is told simply and easily, without the frilly prose. Don’t be fooled, though, because the emotions and issues raised aren’t simple or easy at all.

How many times have you told a friend, “I will be fine,” when it’s not true? When does compromising in a marriage (partnership, relationship) get out of balance? Are you unhappy in your marriage, but don’t “have the energy to rock the boat”? Afraid of being on your own financially? Perhaps currently without a job, so you don’t have insurance in case of an emergency – the plight of millions and Josh’s soon-to-be-ex. Do you feel like you’ve failed if your marriage did, so now you “second-guess every decision”? Are you dealing with custody issues, so there will always be a bond with your ex, an obstacle to fully letting go? Or, for whatever reason you find yourself single, do you feel like an outsider amongst your friends? Disheartened you may never find your soulmate, having tried or won’t use a dating app (as happens in the novel), as it’s too risky and who believes what anyone says about themselves online these days?

Ideally, you’ll meet someone naturally. In this romantic set-up, at your child’s school.

Layla and Josh have chosen professions that aren’t fancy, elitist, high-paying jobs. Making lots of money isn’t what drives some of us. Nor appreciate the yo-yoing worrying about your partner spending like crazy, like Layla’s ex did.

Elementary school teachers aren’t well-paid, particularly compared to their critical value in a child’s formative years. Josh didn’t go to college since he loves using his hands and solving wiring problems that can save homes from bursting in flames (as happens in the novel early on.) His friends also chose non-academic careers. Maybe like the reader, someone in your family, or circle of friends. Josh’s world is the working, middle-class our country has forgotten for too long.

The narrative style of this novel differs from others Graves has written in terms of alternating timeframes. Instead of separating Present and Past by chapters, the Now and Then are integrated within a chapter in several pages of italicized flashbacks. The flashbacks smoothly transition from something expressed in the Now that reminds Layla and Josh of their past.

Initially, I wanted more of Now than Then, but as the story develops the flashbacks offer an interesting perspective for understanding what happened in two marriages that didn’t work out. Given 50% of all marriages end in divorce, it’s a worthy literary technique for providing a vehicle for people to see and reflect on past errors of judgment or other mistakes made hoping not to repeat them again.

The prose strikes the right note, even when the anger of youth seen in the flashbacks is sometimes profane. Used in context and not overwhelming, it’s washed over by the rest.

Romance aside, Layla also has a dear friend, Tonya, who teaches at the same school and consistently watches her back. Another, Annie, she’s come to know well having taught all three of her rambunctious boys. The three have fun and show friendships can make all the difference too.

Freewill, apt title, is a song that “always stuck with Josh,” the words “simplistically yet profoundly true.” Precisely the way this pleasing novel comes across.

Lorraine

Female doctoring, activism, and mysteries in the desert Southwest (Phoenix, Arizona, present-day): Retired university family physician/poet/novelist Sandra Cavallo Miller is on a mission to show us what it’s really like for a woman to practice family medicine out West, particularly in Arizona. Her brand is writing comforting novels in poetic, atmospheric, easy-flowing prose with real life authenticity that feels cozy even when realities aren’t.

Where No One Should Live presents a harsher, blazing hot landscape than in her earlier trilogy: the Dr. Abby Wilmore medical series, mostly set in a clinic at the Grand Canyon National Park (see https://enchantedprose.com/what-the-river-said/). Her fourth novel is also set in Arizona, this time Phoenix, where the author lives, at Arizona Public Health and a clinic that trains medical residents like Miller did for hundreds of doctors in training.

Despite all the trials and tribulations she puts her characters through and packs into roughly 250-page novels, they sing out to us because we recognize these people: the powerful and the vulnerable. Relationships drive Miller’s novels, good and bad ones.

Her new female family medicine physician and protagonist is, like the former Abby Wilmore, quite likeable. You’ll wish all your doctors were as compassionate and forthcoming. Both are unsure of themselves, though for different reasons. Maya, more than Abby, hides her personal demons, hinted at and then revealed bit by bit. Painfully aware of her traumatic issue every day, she strives to rise above it using what she’s experienced for the betterment of her community.

Happiness is not easy for Maya as she’s not one to sit back, taking on more than she should, including coming to the rescue of others – doctors who suddenly sicken, her old horse and an unbroken one. All the while dealing with the additional challenges of illnesses prevalent out West brought on by the intense heat, severe drought, toxic plants, funguses, parasites, mosquitos, and much more. Miller has a talent for blending the medical into her stories so we won’t turn away from them as she wants us to be aware and informed.

Turning her lens on females practicing family medicine, not typically seen in fiction, although today there are more women than men in medical school, is purposeful. Men still dominate some fields of medicine, and it’s still an uphill battle for women to achieve equity in salaries, leadership positions, and negative attitudes in a traditionally male enterprise.

Cleverly, Miller chooses Maya’s boyfriend, with whom she’s been in a romantic relationship with when the novel opens, in one of those male-dominated specialties, cardiology. Whit Whitaker couldn’t be more handsome to go along with his swelled view of himself. Self-centered and lacking empathy, he’s demanding, jealous, and overprotective of his girlfriend, oppressively so. You’ll be asking why Maya stays with him. He’ll get under your skin, as intended. 

Unless I’m reading too much into it, Miller names some of her characters and animals to make a statement about them or the desert. Summer, most obvious, symbolic of the unrelenting heat that overwhelms throughout. Whit to mean he’s so shallow, who cares a whit about him? Luna, her thirty-year-old female horse from childhood she’s still over the moon about, treating her like an aging goddess? Or, Twinkie, her twenty-five-year-old, giant Desert Tortoise who isn’t soft nor getting smaller like the new creamy vanilla treats are. Twinkie is a stunning reminder that things are different in Arizona. A family can actually adopt a giant tortoise as a pet in Arizona, like her parents did when she was growing up. Take a look at amazing one-hundred-year-old Ralph in this video from an Arizona zoo:

The bond between humans and animals is poignant as Maya knows how uplifting this special relationship can be with a horse for a boy with a heavy heart. Rafael is her undocumented neighbor’s and friend’s son, Rosa. His father, from Guatemala, disappeared three years ago and there’s been no trace of him, reflecting immigration issues on our border states we’ve yet to figure out how to humanely solve. Rafael is too serious for a ten-year-old boy. Maya’s tenderness for him, the family’s situation, and her joy of spending downtime with both of them is an important part of her life. She lets Rafael feed and spend time with Luna, who lives in a barn attached to her parents’ home she lives in, after they decided to move to a retirement home, raising another reality of today’s life for the sandwiched generation. Her parents remind us of Doctors Without Borders volunteers, giving selflessly to provide desperately needed medical care in the poorest of countries.

As if Maya hasn’t enough on her plate, Miller adds one more problem lurking. No one knows it exists for a while, revealed to us early on through a mysterious, anonymous, of course, Journal. Periodic entries in-between chapters are brief yet ominous as the writer has it out for someone. Who? We’re not sure. Why? No clue. How? That you’ll surmise when you start seeing a pattern developing. Even when you do, you may still be hard pressed to figure out the evil culprit and motive. I did ten pages before he or she was exposed, which isn’t saying much as the novel ended twenty pages later.

Another male doctor, Alex Reddish, is also in the picture early on. Maya works with him at the residency clinic. Again, his name could signify how flustered, as in how red someone’s face can turn whose socially awkward. In his case, it’s his quirky “mannerisms” Maya picks up. Later, she’ll learn he was a former chess champion, stereotyped as a nerd in contrast to Whit. You’re heart goes out to Alex when he admits to himself he’s attracted to and cares about Maya, but too modest and respectful of her supposedly great catch Whit to interfere, let alone know how to go about letting her know his feelings. He’s another really good person you’ll be rooting for. Maya and Alex’s humility and humanity are just what a fine doctor would order.

Maya doesn’t just treat the holistic health of individual patients, she examines and aims to treat the public health of a community. For example, she’s the unpopular activist for passing a helmet law for all Arizona motorcyclists in a state that only mandates protection if you’re under 18. Like today’s polarized world, she does so at great personal risk as she’s been receiving scary threats. And yet, she persists.

At Arizona Public Health, a few characters stand out. Sheila, a nurse, a “wizard” Maya couldn’t live without. Once again, like the author did in her trilogy, she highlights the vital roles of nurses. Dr. Mel Black, in his sixties like Sheila, has “brooding” looks that come from a personal loss, triggering his joining “the roller coaster of public health.” Both look out for Maya.

 A couple of residents who stand out include Jim, who’s having the most difficulty performing. Sometimes he acts okay, at other times he seems to have checked out, and his diagnoses miss things. What’s wrong with him becomes a medical mystery that’s eventually uncovered. His inability to excel is troubling to the medical team, allowing us to see how hard it is for doctors to speak negatively of another. The other resident is Veronica: extremely capable but inappropriately flirtatious.

To borrow the words of MSNBC anchor, Rachel Maddow: “Watch this space.” Because another novel by Miller is due out in 2022. Prolific, fortunately for us.

Lorraine

Realistic and fantastical individual and ecological interconnectedness (New England, Midwest, Southern, and Western US, a South Pacific island, Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic; contemporary timeframe): Cai Emmons is an extraordinary wordsmith who’s created a two-book series on the magical powers of personal relationships and their interconnected relationships with Nature, and how individuals and groups have the power to change the trajectory of the climate change crisis. Each stands alone; together their strength is multiplied so this review encompasses both.

Weather Woman, the original novel, introduces some of the same well-drawn characters you’ll find in Sinking Islands. Its focus is primarily America; the sequel expands globally.

Book 1 sets forth the fantastical plot: that someone fascinated by weather and cloud formations since childhood is so acutely sensitive to atmospheric conditions they have a supernatural ability to alter the weather. Bronwyn Artair, thirty, getting her doctorate at MIT in atmospheric sciences, is that person. Unlike anyone you’ve known or heard of, her “long, wavy, dark-red hair” makes her physically stand out, but her superhuman power makes her unique.

Bronwyn’s rare gift takes the message of what each of us could do to make any difference in reducing global warming is far-fetched, extreme, but extreme eerie weather is what’s happening around the world. Scientists have told us time is running out; not everyone is listening or feels the urgency to act aggressively like Bronwyn intensely does. Everything about these novels is intense, including Emmons’ gifted prose.

Bronwyn “does not read people as she reads the earth.” She “burns hotter” with her “gutsy, mercurial nature.” Her mother died five years ago, leaving her awfully alone. Except when she’s in Nature, the “perfect solution for soothing a human being,” when she’s not “lost in a cyclone of loneliness.” The author’s literary, poetic prose is gorgeous: sometimes expressed meteorologically.

Emmons writes about the human condition of loneliness and how the devastation of climate change has caused profound loneliness. In Sinking Islands, we’re taken to more places around the globe where climate destruction has either transformed or threatens to erase their beauty. The mood in both novels isn’t just gloom and doom, though; it’s also wonderment and awe of Nature’s therapeutic powers and why we must find therapies to save and heal our aching planet. 

If you think the premise is too wacky, too science-fiction-y, consider a proven scientific concept cited called the Butterfly Effect. The phenomenon captures Bronwyn’s moral dilemma when she finally accepts she can change weather (Book 1). The video below explains the theory as: “Small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case”:

In both novels, but more seriously in Sinking Islands, Bronwyn thinks not only of the potential benefits of her power but of unintended, harmful consequences. Described as a “thinker,” we get to see how she thinks and how her thinking evolves starting with the first time she’s done something unbelievable with a storm atop Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, famous for its extreme weather.

Initially, she thinks whatever she’d done is an aberration; we think it’s a weird coincidence. When she influences weather again, she thinks something’s wrong in her brain. When it happens again, she’s tormented by thinking she’s “coming unhinged,” having a nervous breakdown, or experiencing early onset dementia. When a witness sees how she stopped rain at a wedding, it spreads virally. Add a couple more witnesses to other weather conditions and she’s disgusted that she’s lost her privacy. Until she starts wondering could she do it again? Then tests herself in Kansas and Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, later California’s wildfire country. Weather Woman tracks her evolution.

Sinking Islands raises the stakes from what one individual can do to experimenting with teaching others since she alone cannot possibly change the weather around the world. In Book 1 she’s “in love with the world like never before”; in Book 2 she spreads that love to a select group ripe for her interventions as they’re from beautiful places that global warming has despoiled. Their coming together isn’t just a statement about making a difference ecologically, but how doing so affects our relationships and humanity.

Weather Woman opens with Bronwyn’s doctoral studies under the mentorship of Professor Diane Fenwick, whom she’s known since she was eighteen; Diane convinced her to pursue academic science. They became very close friends; Diane loves her like the daughter and child she never had. (Happily married to Joe, a novelist who spends time in their cozy cottage in Maine to write). Mentor and mentee have two different personalities: Diane, the “extrovert” confident and commanding; “painfully shy” Bronwyn unsure of herself.

Hard sciences at an elite institution is a tough place for a woman. Bronwyn is constantly mocked by male students to such a degree that she questions and then decides she’s not cut out for academia and leaves the program to Diane’s great dismay, which continues into the sequel. Moving to southern New Hampshire to work as a meteorologist on TV, Bronwyn rents a secluded cabin in the woods overlooking a peaceful river. One day a reporter from Florida, Matt, shows up at the station and is immediately attracted to her. Their story is intense. How could it not be given Bronwyn’s intensity? Unlike Diane, a doubter of anything unless backed up by scientific data, he’s heard about Bronwyn’s otherworldly power, doesn’t believe it either but willing to turn his life upside down to be with her. Joe, whose career relies on imagination, is open-minded too, along with a few other believers appearing in one or both novels.

It’s Diane’s belief in Bronwyn that matters most. But her reaction is that this isn’t “thinking outside the-box – this is thinking outside the range of known human capability.” The reader will see whether Diane comes around or not in Sinking Islands.

Emmons, who taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Oregon, describes herself as a “word-lover” and “people lover” – both on full display. Sinking Islands has an even more ambitious reach than Weather Woman, but both are remarkable and thought-provoking.

The sinking island earns the title of Book 2 because it’s more momentous than a “discrete thing” as “all oceans are connected.” Located in the South Pacific, it could be any of the “islands of plastic” in which “apocalyptic” floods have washed plastics onto the shore, overwhelming sewage systems spreading “industrial chemicals, and human waste, and algae bloom, and deadly bacteria.” Two characters stand out in the island storyline: eleven-year-old Penina who has “limitless energy” like Bronwyn, and her lonely father Analu. He and Nahani, his wife, have already grieved the loss of their other two children who drowned from the high waters, so they decided to leave the island despite a dying grandmother’s wish not to. For Analu, the island has become a “winking hologram of beauty and sadness.”

A different type of “water crisis” is happening in São Paulo, Brazil. Severe drought is “squeezing the verve from everyone.” Felipe, a dancer in the theatre with the body of “Adonis,” is the central character. At forty, he’s single as dance has been his life. “Hydric collapse” means audiences are so on the edge they’re not coming to performances. This once lively city is rioting over water, diseases are spreading from standing water collected in buckets, and reservoirs are alarmingly low for a city that once owned “twelve percent of the world’s fresh water.” “Where does the soul of a city reside?”

Emmons whisks us to the Arctic Circle to draw our attention to magnitudes: survival under the most extreme weather conditions in Greenland, where the melting glaciers remind us of the butterfly effect warming Earth, affecting all of us. Except these hardy, resourceful Greenlanders still feel the “delicious joy of being alive.” Why don’t we, given all we have, the novel asks.

Although these two novels can’t provide answers, the message is we can still do something, individually and as a group. We’ll never have Bronwyn’s mythical ability to “coral” enormous concentration to release enormous energy through the body into the atmosphere, but we can make an effort that can have ripple effects.

Lorraine